Astros plan to stay in the pool on international spending

KISSIMMEE, Fla. — The Yankees may be extravagant spenders this summer, when baseball’s 2014-15 international signing period opens on July 2.

The Astros won’t join them.

The Astros again have more international bonus money allotted to them than any team because they finished with the worst record in the majors last season. But the team doesn’t figure to exceed its pool — even if other clubs think that’s the right play.

“It depends on your strategy and how you prioritize getting players this year vs. losing players next year,” Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow said. “There are rules in place, and if you spend over your allotment, not only do you get hit with tax, but you get with a loss of ability to sign players the following year. That’s not something the Houston Astros are willing to do. We want to be signing players every year.

“There are clubs that have appear to have, or have in the past, decided to invest in players the current year in order to forego some opportunities in the future years. That’s not a strategy that we employ, but we do have the luxury of having one of the larger pools, so we don’t necessarily have to employ it to get the talent we want.”

Signing bonus pools are increased each year based on the annual growth rate of total industry revenue, per the collective bargaining agreement. The Astros’ allotment won’t be too different from last year’s, when they used some of their $4,943,700 to add Dominican shortstops Joan Mauricio ($600,000), Wilson Amador ($400,000) and Dominican infielder Wander Franco ($575,000), among others.

Franco is the nephew of big leaguer Erick Aybar and former big leaguer Willy Aybar. Bonus figures were reported by Baseball America.

Teams that spend anywhere up to 5 percent above their bonus pool in the 2014-15 year will be taxed 100 percent on the overage. An overspend of 5 to 10 percent includes a 100 percent overage penalty and the loss of the ability to sign any player in the next signing period for more than $500,000. At 10-15 percent, the cap in the next signing period is $300,000, and at more than 15 percent, the club loses the right to sign a player for more than $300,000 for two straight periods.

International spending hasn’t exactly been curbed by this system, which was put in place along with the most recent CBA. Baseball America calculated that teams did spend less in 2012, $84 million, than they did the year before, $87 million. But last year, $97 million was doled out.

The figures exclude signings of Cuban players, Asian foreign pro players and Mexican League transfers. Players who are least 23 years of age and have played as a professional in a league recognized by the commissioner’s office for a minimum of five seasons don’t count toward the bonus pool — i.e., Japanese players like Masahiro Tanaka.

The Yankees could spend $15 million or more in the 2014-15 year, according to estimates.

Teams could be inclined to overspend in a particular year if the talent that year exceeds projections for the next. There could also be a get-em-while-you-can sentiment: An international draft may eventually be instituted, perhaps as soon as the next CBA, which would take away the opportunity to sign the amount of talent the Yankees may be poised to at one time.

“Five years from now, when we have the lowest pool, we may think differently,” Luhnow said, “But for right now, that’s our strategy. We know what everybody else is doing, or at least we try and find out as much as we can about what everybody else is doing, because it informs our tactics as well.”

Signing periods run from July 2 through June 15 of the following year. The youngest a player can sign is age 16, as long as he turns 17 before Sept. 1 or by the completion of his first minor league season.

No signings can officially happen until July 2, but groundwork is almost always laid in advance. Per Baseball America, the Astros last July thought they had Venezuelan catcher Jose Herrera wrapped up, but he ended up signing with the Diamondbacks for $1.06 million.

“There are various levels of interest and potentially verbal commitments, but that happens every year, and what ends up happening after July 2 isn’t always what you expect or what you heard is going to happen,” Luhnow said generally. “So we’ll have to wait and see. But we feel good about the players we’ve seen, the process we’ve got in place and an opportunity to get a good return on our pool.”

The reputation for this year’s class of players is a strong one, Luhnow said. But international amateurs are so young when they sign, playing against varying levels of competition and in varying environments.

“It’s always harder to read these classes,” Luhnow said. “I think if you historically go back and a look at when people thought this was a good crop vs. a mediocre crop, there’s not a ton of correlation between how many runs were produced at the big league level. A lot of the top players that got the top bonuses never made it out of rookie ball. And some of the guys that get 5,000 bucks made it to the big leagues. And you’d expect that, because we’re talking about 14, 15, 16-year-old kids who are still physically developing and learning to play the game.

“Having said all that, this crop is a good crop. It’s one of the stronger crops in the past five years. And we’ve done a great job of scouting them and we feel like we have our priorities in terms of which players we’re going to give special attention to and attempt to sign, and it’s a competitive market no doubt about it.”

Oz Ocampo heads up the Astros’ international efforts. Luhnow himself makes scouting trips, as does director of pro scouting Kevin Goldstein.

“Oz has done a nice job of building relationships with the player advisors so that we have access to all the players, because that first hurdle is making sure that you’re seeing all the right guys,” Luhnow said. “Inviting them to come to your academy so you can not only see them play, but get to know them a little bit in person and get to know their personalities and what drives them. There’s a lot of that that’s been happening.

“When we have a player there we’re going to invest money in, we want not only multiple opinions, but opinions from scouts, opinions from player development people, opinions from Dominicans, opinions from Americans, as many as we can get. We look at video.”